How to restrict by regions and instance types in AWS with IAM

The use case is easy, and if you work with AWS I’m pretty sure that you have faced this requirement at some point: I don’t want a certain group of users of a particular AWS account to create anything anywhere. I had to configure the security of one of our AWS accounts to only allow users to work with EC2 and a few other AWS services in only two regions (N. Virginia and Ireland in this case). In addition to that, and to keep our budget under control, we wanted to limit the instance types they can use, in this example we will only allow to use EC2 instances that are not bigger than 16GB of RAM (for a quick view of all available EC2 instances types see http://www.ec2instances.info).

Thanks to the documentation and AWS Support, I came across this solution (as an example). The only issue is that, at the moment, we can not hide features in the AWS Console, but at least AWS Support is very clear and supportive on that. They know how challenging is IAM for certain requirements.

Go to IAM -> Policies -> Create Policy -> Create Your Own Policy and use the next json code or in this gist link as reference to write your own based on your requirements. After that you have to attach that policy to the role/user/group you want to.